Jen Black's Blog, page 99

Finished or still Tinkering?

Do you know when you've finished writing a book? I'm not sure I do.
If I've reached the word count I wanted and the story has reached a grand denouement (Ha!) it's tempting to think 'Good that's done' and go on to something else. But...and it's a big but that won't go away... ideas start occurring in the little grey cells.

Thoughts like ... Didn't I intend to re-write chapter 4 in order to have the main character meet Meg then instead of two weeks later? Do I really need that prologue, or should I ditch it? What if I changed the POV and took out some of the minor characters to make the main story line more powerful? and the worst one of all: Good grief! I forgot to write the scene where she told the Dowager who had stolen the child!

Once this sort of mind set starts up there's no escape. Revisions are not only recommended, but required! This must be where it is bliss to have an agent or an editor read your work and tell you where you've gone wrong or where the story could be improved. The cold, clear eye of the professional must be invaluable. On the other hand, does it then become a joint effort? Depends on the amount of professional input, perhaps, but right now I'd settle for any at all!

Once you've written all the bits you forgot to include in the first draft, re-written the paragraphs to match where the plot changed as you went along, tweaked characters who probably said and did the wrong thing at the wrong time, then there's the endless fiddling with the English language. There are so many ways of saying the same thing, so many variations of word, of word order, where to place the comma or where to use a semi colon that this sort of re-writing can go on forever. Once I had a good grasp of where to use a comma, but five years of critique group work has left me confused because Americans do it differently to the UK. Their use of language is definitely more fluid that ours and I cannot help cringing when I see nouns used as verbs, or verbs used as nouns. I passed an example last night: "the crystal fell in shatters to the floor." Ah well, some readers will love it.
When you've gone through all these possibilities at least once, then it might be possible you novel is finished. What do you think? Another run through, just to be sure?

A decade of paperwork

Today should be the start of getting back to normal. There's been a week of upheaval at chez Black, but now I have only a few books to move back to their original place and voila! I'm done. It was a good opportunity to weed out all the accumulated rubbish of the past decade, and I've filled the "paper" wheelie-bin ready for collection tomorrow. It is amazing to see how long I have been sending out submissions. The first was dated 8th March 2001 and in it I committed almost every sin - giving my age, mentioning a brother - I mean, what has that to do with my writing? Hopefully I've got better at it.

Not that learning to write query letters and stuff brings success. It brings the same old rejection letters, but now they all say I write very well but they don't love the work quite enough to go with it. I suspect I will have to change the format of my book and bring it into line with all the Queen-type books for sale these days. It seems from my latest dip into the market place that men write from the male POV and women write from the female. There are exceptions, but generally, that is the way it works, but I've done both in the same story. Time for a re-think.

With more snow forecast for today, plus the fact that I'm bowling off to Durham for lunch with friends, I thought I'd put up a picture of the lovely walk along the river bank at Durham on a hot, sunny day. The wooden steps down, used by the boat crews, were steaming in the heat! Those were the days....

Medieval Manners

More things learned from Ian Mortimer, all useful to me. He's talking about 1300-1400. I'm writing about 1543, a mere hundred and forty years later. Some things seem to have changed very little, especially in regard to manners which is my topic for today.
 AydonYou followed the protocols, if you knew what was good for you. When visiting, you left your weapons at the gate and did not presume to enter a man's hall without permission. If you were visiting someone of yeoman status or above, a servant would announce you. Grander houses had chamberlains or ushers, who would take you to your host. Remove your cap and keep it in your hand until told you may replace it. You bowed to a person of equal status, and if they were of higher status,you knelt, right knee to the ground.

Before the king, you grovelled! The instructions were: Kneel on entering the chamber, walk to the centre of the room and kneel again. The king will beckon you forward, and you move toward him. The chamberlain will tell you when to stop and at that point, you kneel for the third time and wait until he addresses you. It was considered polite to begin with a greeting, once you have been asked to speak - 'God speed, my lord' for example, and don't forget to bow each time you speak. Do not avert your eyes, but regard him honestly and directly.
Most of all, never turn your back on a social superior.

I wondered exactly what yeoman status might be, and here's the answer: a Yeoman or Franklin owns 30 acres, known as a yardland, and his own team of 8 oxen. He may have servants.
A Reeve oversees a manor.
A Villein was bound to serve his lord. With only one or two acres he found it difficult to feed himself and his family from such a small plot.
The word peasant was not used in the 1400s, but terms like Rustici (meaning "countryman") and Nativi ("born to servitude") were used.

Bondmen, like villeins, were not free men. They worked the land for their lord, and have the use of some land for which they paid rent. Their crops technically belonged to the lord, and he could take whatever he wanted, but usually only a "heriot" was required - a gift on the villein's death. If the land was sold, then the villein and his family were sold with it; the lord controlled who his villeins married. He could demand compensation if a daughter married out of the family, or select a husband for a widow. Refusal could end in prison. To me, it sounds like slavery.

Things were different then

How have I missed Dr Ian Mortimer? I've only just discoverd he writes fiction as James Forrester, and yes, I've read them. Duh. Now I am deep into the Time Traveller's Guide ot Medieval England, and enjoying all the detail. He claims that medieval man  had no understanding of cultural development which is why the paintings on the fourteenth century church walls depict Christ and his disciples in medieval clothes.

He says, and I believe him, that almost everything about the fourteenth century is different from the modern world.  Consider the aristocracy of England, who have been speaking French since the Norman invasion in 1066. By the fourteenth century, they are only just switching to English. Edward III speaks English, books start to be written in English even though Latin is still the preferred language of law. English slowly becomes the tongue of the country even though old knights and ladies cannot be bothered to learn a new language "at their age." Cornwall persists in speaking Cornish, and Wales in Welsh. If dialects present problems today, they were so much stronger more prevalent and more difficult in medieval days.

Knowing the date is such an easy thing today. But medieval English people considered Lady Day, 25th March, as the start of a new year. Some aristocrats prefer 1st January, and clerks of the Exchequer begin their new year on Michaelmas Day, 29th September.
All three systems were in use at the same time, and things are furthe complicated when you know that Florence and Venice work a year behind England. Portugal and Castile operate a different calendar altogether and sailing into Lisbon would have taken you into a future 39 years ahead of England. Nobody uses the term Anno Domini, either. They use the regnal year, ie I am writing this in the sixty first year of Elizabeth II.

Other things are different, too. Work and working condition, for a start. Then there's money, and dress and education....

PS We have frogspawn - and the little pond is frozen!

Medieval money

Medieval money is sometimes a mystery. The UK went decimal in the early seventies, but before that the system was based on the pound sterling, or the pound in weight of silver. The most common coin was the silver penny (1d). Twelve pennies made a shilling (1s) and twenty shillings made one pound (£1)

Until 1344 only silver was considered money. There was a big silver groat worth 4d, and pennies, half-pennies and farthings (1/4d or one quarter of a penny.) In 1344,  new coins arrived - a florin or double leopard worth 6s, along with a half-florin or leopard (3s) and a quarter-florin or helm (1s 6d).

In 1351 came the noble (6s 8d). Nobles, half-nobles and quarter-nobles were minted in gold. The earlier coins were minted in silver.

Just to confuse everything, there was also the mark, worth 13s 4d. Those of you who are good with numbers (which I am not!)  will realise that the noble (6s 8d) is exactly  a third of £1 and half of a mark. This made counting money much easier.

Between 1279 and 1399 there were perhaps 160 different sorts of penny struck, and this was because there were several mints operating at once. Three royal mints operated from Berwick, Canterbury and the Tower of London. The abbot of Bury St Edmunds, the bishop of Durham and the archbishop of York operated private mints and the marks changed when a new man was elected to the top post.

Scotland, needless to say, had its own mints and its own coinage.

A woman's lot

I've been thinking about women. Not today's women, but women in history. So many modern stories portray women as feisty, up and at 'em indviduals that it is easy to believe they were like that. But the reality is that they were ruled by a man. Women were divided into rough categories - maiden, wife, widow or nun - and treated accordingly. The maiden is dependent on her father (or other father-figure) , the wife on her husband, nuns, as brides of Christ, depend on the nunnery and only the widow or a rare, aged spinster, had any sort of freedom.

This is true of high-status women as well as those of low-status; it's just that the men who "ruled" them are of even higher status. The Bible, and therefore the Church, taught that women were "the ruin of mankind" because Eve ate the apple of good and evil, and from that, all sorts of negatives were heaped up women. Smaller, meeker, slower in working and moving, more feeble than a man. (Well, they would be, wouldn't they - draped in floor length gowns with sleeves that trailed the ground and steeple hats that must have been hell to get through doorways).

Strange beliefs abounded in the fourteenth century. Men believed that women needed regular sex (thanks mostly to the writings of a third century medic called Galen) and neither party in a marriage should deny the other this pleasure. There was also a belief that a woman must have an orgasm in order to conceive a child. This might be good in one way, but in another it was diabolical. If a woman conceived a child, she had obviously had an orgasm; therefore, a rapist could argue that he had not raped the woman if she took pleasure in the act.

A woman could inherit her husband's land but was not required to provide military service, which was often what had killed him. They could carry on their husband's business after his death, and some who came into business in this way were extremely successful. It is also worth remembering that the second richest person in  fourteenth century England was a woman - Queen Isabella. She was subordinate to her husband, naturally - but she was socially superior to everyone else.

I shall be reading more of Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and adding the bits that interest me here.

Vikings

My interest is shifting and just to give you a clue, here's the opening passage from a book whose title I will not reveal until the end of the post. 
"As Rome fought great battles along the Rhine and lost whole legions in the darkling Teutoberg forest, a people-group made their way into a sparsely settled land. Cold, inhospitable and with a short growing season, it seemed an unlikely place to generate sufficient spare resources to enable a few generations of men to develop an ocean-going ship from a curious assembly of planks and rope in which you or I would not cross a boating lake. Yet that is what happened: as continental influences and migrations from the east caused the cultural changes that led from the Vendal culture to the people we have come to call the Vikings and the inter-reaction of cultures seems to have accelerated developments in boat technology....From this unlikely beginning developed a particular line of sailing vessels which could attempt ocean voyages across the Atlantic and - at the other extreme - light craft which could deal with shallow, fast flowing rivers and were capable of being moved across land to another river or lake."
So says J Kim Siddorn in his book Vikings, Weapons and Warfare.

I agree with him that there is much to admire in the Viking culture and from 793 onwards right up to and including the Norman invasion, Viking genes were planted across the lands that currently make up the UK. Few areas escaped attention. Given the small population then, and the widespread infiltration by Vikings, it isn't surprising that so many of us carry traces of them. No doubt it also explains our fascination with them. Race memory opens one eye when it hears the name...

The Half-Empty vew of Writing Fiction

Advice from a famous writer: Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish the wretched novel. Forget about the 3 or 400 pages you hope to write and write just one page each day. Then when you get to the 400th page, you are always surprised.
 Write as quickly as you can. Don't stop to correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Re-writing is usually an excuse for not continuing and interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
 Don't think of your readers. Their nameless faces will scare you to death and they don't really exist. Write to one reader—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one. It sometimes helps.
 If a scene is troublesome and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole book you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there. On the other hand, the scene that becomes precious will usually be the one that is discarded.Speak dialogue as you write it - only then will it sound true. The writer was convinced there was magic in story writing, and also convinced no one had ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. "The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story."Who was this famous author? I'll write it backwards and  in tiny print so it doesn't leap out and spoil your fun. kcebniets nhoj
 
  

Titles - Joy or Torture?

Are you good at thinking up titles for your book? Next to writing all the bits that go with the submission, I find coming up with a memorable title almost the hardest thing of all.
I’ve always understood that the publisher, or more accurately the marketing department, has the last word on this, but even so, you want a good title when you send something out to an agent. I’ve always considered it as a working title that may later change, but this alone can make you feel it’s hardly worth slogging away for hours when what you’ve dreamed up may not last.
But the title is part of the package that will hopefully catch an agent’s attention, so … remember it will set up an association of ideas in the agent’s mind, perhaps even at a subconscious level, before they finish reading your cover letter. Think about it: you only have to see the words Cruel Mistress, Considerate Lover and you know you can’t be far from the category romance. Cloud Atlas, and you know you are moving into the realms of literary fiction. Words, even single  words, have great power and depending on your perception and their context, words convey whole volumes of meaning. a good example would be Revelation. Others might be Heretic, or Heresy, Treason. Look at them, and see what filters into your mind. Those few small words, when applied to your book, will set up a whole raft of expectations in your reader.
If you thought up a good, strong title that captures the eye, the chances are good that the publisher will keep it, and that will give you a nice warm little glow in the days when your book is for sale. So the first step is to decide what sort of a book you’ve written. Romance? Thriller? That gives you a handle on the sort of titles you should consider. Then start thinking of any ad every title you could possibly use. I check them against Amazon, because one thing you don’t want is a title that  has already been used – and possibly used more than once, for more than one genre.
Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent, recommends free associating at this point: write lists, she says.  Put all the words associated with your book "in columns: nouns, verbs, adjectives. Describe or suggest the setting. Then think about each of your major characters and write down words that relate to them. Think about the action in the story and write down verbs that capture it.” Keep going until you have at least 100 words.
There has been a fashion (it may even be passé now) for single word titles, which can be powerful. If not, put combinations of your words together. If you have a thesaurus, use it. to jog your memory. From this point, you should be able to winkle out perhaps 20 possible titles. Then go away and do something else for a day. The following day, add any ideas you’ve had in the intervening 24 hours to your list. Then select the five that appeal most and try them out on other people.
A couple of days later, consider how your potential titles would sit in among the lists you’ve seen on Amazon – or your local bookshop if that’s handy. Are you happy to make a final choice? Does the selected title match your book? Does it suggest right away that this book is Romance, Historical, Thriller? Is there any sense of a time period within the words? Will it attract attention from the buying public? If you are planning a series, can your title be adapted or made to fit and match with later volumes? Dunnett connected six of her titles in the Lymond series to chess, and the idea worked beautifully.
Rachelle has more to say on the topic.

Rejections, hashtags and freebies

I've just returned from a meeting with writer friends and so my spirits are high in spite of two rejections this week. One rejection came whizzing back within 3 hours, which must be a record! I alternate between thinking that a) the agency is super efficient or b)that my submission was complete and utter rubbish.

Great strides have been made this week by my discovery of #hashtags when using Twitter.  I've always wondered what function they had, and that other funny little @ symbol - well, now I know and it's all thanks to a great little download from Kindle - Indie Author Book Marketing Success.

Also FAR AFTER GOLD is going free on Kindle today and tomorrow and the times are Pacific Coast times. This means that for my UK friends, the offer will run on after midnight UK time. If someone reads, enjoys and cares to post a review on Amazon, that would be great.

I see there is to be a further programme on Richard III this week. The 27th February to be exact, on More 4 at  9pm. The Radio Times claims this will feature the tests carried out after the discovery of his bones, so I shall be watching. I thought the earlier programme a little light in that department, and have high hopes of this one. I shall be surprised if there isn't a flurry of historical novels on Richard being published in the next few months. A certain Ms Gregory must be smiling every day! Nearly as much as Hilary Mantel after the furore over her speech at the London Book Review - anyone who hasn't read the full speech ought to do so - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies

Blogger seems reluctant to upload my new pictures thoughI don't know why, so the one above was taken on a trip to Stirling a couple of years ago. I have no idea what kind of transaction was taking place!